ahh .. Myakiy Znak .. my love .. my ruin .. my soft sign.

As you progress through this lesson you will begin to understand this cryptic statement above. The soft-sign is partly what makes the Russian language sound so rich and beautiful, but like a Siren's Song it is both alluring and dangerous to the unwary.

Being such a tiny letter (ь), and given that it has no unique sound of its own, most foreigners tend to skip over the soft-sign as though it doesn't exist. The situation isn't helped by the difficulty of transliterating the soft-sign, and most textbooks simply denote it with an apostrophe ' , which further adds to the tendency to ignore its existence.

But we wouldn't make a special lesson on the soft-sign if it wasn't important, and in some circumstances the correct pronunciation of a letter conjoined with the soft-sign means the difference between being understood or not. The mental hurdle we students have to get over is the fact that it effectively adds 8 or more new sounds to the already inflated Russian alphabet (33 letters).

So please proceed with this lesson only after you are comfortable reading the standard Russian alphabet.

Really, I won't be understood?

The classic example cited in many textbooks is the difference between мать and мат.

мать (mat') means 'mother' in Russian, while мат (mat) means 'obscene language'.

Try not to confuse these two words!

There are some other examples where adding a soft-sign changes the meaning of a word. Thankfully these occurrences are relatively uncommon, and usually if you omit the soft-sign in your pronunciation you will simply be saying a nonsense word that won't be understood.

On the other hand, context helps enormously. For example, if you ask a person from New Zealand to say the word 'pen', they will often say something that sounds more like 'pin'. If they said the word 'pin' on its own then you might be forgiven for misinterpreting the meaning. However, if a Kiwi says "I need a pin to write with", then you can just smile and pass them a pen :)

It's the same with the soft-sign in Russian. Now, I'm ashamed to admit but try as I might I just can't roll my 'r's. It's very disappointing (sigh). And as you will see in the lesson on 'рь' ('r' followed by soft-sign), the ability to roll an r is key to pronouncing words ending with -рь correctly. So, for example, if I say the word for 'door' (дверь) on its own then I am often misunderstood and receive confused looks. This is because I say this word as двер. However, if I say "закрой дверь пожалуйста" (zakroy dvyer pazhaloosta), which means "close the door please" then invariably I am understood even though my pronunciation of -рь isn't perfect.

So if you are having difficulty with any of these new sounds there is still hope you will be understood if you can put the word in context! (actually if you are like me and can't roll your r's there is a cheating method which I will explain in the lesson on -рь).

So how do I pronounce the soft-sign?

Some textbooks and internet sites will tell you that soft-sign is like a soft 'y' sound.

Now this is very misleading, except for when the soft-sign follows 'L' or 'N', that is, -ль or -нь. But if you add a 'y' sound to, for example, -ть or -дь, then you will almost certainly pronounce these types of words incorrectly.

Because of this reason I had to unlearn the pronunciation of many words that I was pronouncing with a soft 'y' sound in place of the soft-sign. Very frustrating indeed!

As you work through the lessons you will notice each consonant + soft-sign combination has a unique sound. And you will be required to use muscles in your tongue in a way you might not have done before. Remember it takes a little while to train new muscles, so don't give up!